Jeff Foust reports that a former NASA manager of the International Space Station announced June 22 that he is starting a new venture that eventually plans to develop a private space station. In a presentation at the NewSpace 2016 conference here, Mike Suffredini, president of the commercial space division of Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies (SGT) who joined the company shortly after retiring from NASA last September, said he has co-founded a new company that initially will seek to install a commercial module on the ISS.
That module would serve as a precursor for a private facility once the ISS is retired, he indicated that they intend to work on a low-Earth orbit platform to follow the International Space Station. The new company, named Axiom Space LLC, was incorporated in January in Delaware but is based in Houston. Suffredini serves as its president and Kam Ghaffarian, the president and chief executive of SGT, is the chief executive.
Axiom Space is in discussions with NASA on a Space Act Agreement that would allow for studies of adding a commercial module to the ISS. What we would like to do is fly a module that begins its life at the International Space Station, Suffredini said in a later interview. That will help us transition from research and manufacturing and everything else done on ISS on a future platform.
Suffredini said he wants to fly the module as early as [possible, which he estimates to be in 2020 or 2021. The company has an unspecified amount of seed funding, and plans to start discussions with investors in the fall. He said he hopes to have a preliminary design review of the module done by December and a contractor selected to build it by January 2017, a schedule he acknowledged was an aggressive one.
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